It's time for Mac Geek Cab and listener Alex brings us our quick tip of the week by sharing. He says maybe everybody is already aware of this, but on the lock screen, you can tap on a widget and it takes you to the corresponding app like weather or fitness or whatever the widget is that you have. Assuming the widget comes from an app, which they all do, it will bring you to the corresponding app. He says, I had no idea. My guess is this is news to other people, too.
More quick tips like this, plus your questions answered today. I'm Matt Geekup, 1025 for Monday, February 19th, National Chocolate Mint Day 2024. Music. Greetings, folks, and welcome to MacGeekGab, the show where you send in quick tips like that, cool stuff found, questions. We share all of the above. We try to answer your questions. We try to learn from all three because the goal is for each and every one of us to learn at least five new things every single time we get together.
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And you can start your free online visit today at hymns.com slash mgg we'll talk more in depth about every single one of those in a minute or 17 here for now here in durham new hampshire i'm dave hamilton here in south dakota i am adam christiansen.
And live at least i think i am from hong kong it's pilot pete greetings everybody man yeah you're all over the place pete i still i'm still astounded that it took us 10 years to figure out that you also could record remotely i i don't know why just because john could right like this show was part of it good to be fair part of it was the skype setup and having the right betas and all all that in the early days that was tougher we had the right betas i mean like john and i
had them and all i would do is put the the new beta that we weren't supposed to talk about but we were talking about it and uh in the in like a drop box for us and john would just download it up and run that you could have done the same thing like we started this show when doing a remote podcast podcast recording was, let's just say, not as turnkey a solution as it is today. But we did it. Like, we figured it out. And it was no big deal once we had it up and running.
I don't know why we, like, we easily could have done this. Like, there's no reason. It's just us being ridiculous. Anyway, hopefully your internet lasts. Hey, there is a little follow-up to Alex's quick tip that I shared in the opening. He says, if you wanted to open an app this way that does not offer a widget, it is possible to add that to the lock screen by adding a shortcut that you create in the shortcuts app. And then you can have there is an action, a shortcut action for open app.
And so you could put a little, uh, you know, widget on your lock screen to open an app that doesn't offer widgets and boom, you know, the, the shortcut will do its job and you're off to the races. So nice. Yeah. And a lot of people use thumb, thumbprint, fingerprint on the older phones and then face ID on the new phones. So security, if you're doing that, will it open the app without your face ID?
No, I have a way to do it. If it doesn't, I think you've got. unlock your phone and and we will acknowledge something that that the three of us talked about pre-show is that pete's internet is questionable despite him having recorded from this hotel before you you you you cut out a little bit while you were saying that it was all very intelligible and all good but i just figured i'd acknowledge it okay yeah it is spotty this morning for
whatever reason not entirely sure well i was going to say initially you can set your watch if you have the the Apple Watch, as long as it's in and you've got a passcode on it, it will unlock the phone for you. So you don't have to be looking at your phone. I forget about that. With all the, with face ID, you know, cause if I'm, if I'm looking at the screen, chances are it has unlocked itself.
But if you're, like you said, if you're, if you're using, you know, a touch ID based phone still or something then, yeah. And there's times, well, now it does a nice job in the dark. I guess it used infrared lighting or something like that. So even in a darkened room, it'll unlock for you. But there's times when I've found that I've had my phone off at an angle either for, you know, so as not to disturb Debbie with the light on from my phone when
she's asleep, you know, and on her side and facing me. I don't want to light her up with the phone. Yeah, right. And so I can turn the phone away from me and it'll still open apps because my watch is unlocked and it just unlocks. You said that Face ID uses infrared.
I don't think that's correct. i think face i thought i used something for low light technology it's not light right from from what i understand adam it's it's doing like facial 3d mapping right that's right yeah but yeah but it's using that ir dot projector right oh it is infrared that mapping okay okay i mean it's projecting those billions of dots to spatial that you need to surface map your face basically yeah Right, right. Oh, and it's doing that with infrared. Okay, all right.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't think it's LiDAR. Somebody in the Discord, Uncle Jamie, asked if it was LiDAR. I don't think it is. It's called the TrueDepth camera, right? But maybe it is. Yeah, it uses a combination of stuff, but I mean, that's part of that IR projector. And I think you can, like with certain cameras, you can even see those dots, right? You can see infrared dots with some cameras. Yeah, but what is it? how does it work uh projecting thousands of invisible dots yeah it's infrared.
To do the dots so it's not lidar um which which i would have thought it would be but that you know lidar is not cheap i guess i don't know but uh yeah i'll put a i'll put a link to well neither's the phone to be fair what's that what are you what are you trying to say, they aren't giving them away this week again gosh man i i thought with the vision pro out now um yeah yeah yeah speaking of vision pro adam you want to take us to mark's tip about uh some fun things sure yeah uh mark says um.
I don't see the tip in here. Okay, yeah. No, I thought you went away. I will, I'll take this one then. Sorry. I think I set you up for failure, Adam. There's a link to it. Mark shared a link to the accessibility features on Vision Pro on Apple's site. And so there are all kinds of them. And we will link to this too. You know, there are, there's voiceover, there's Zoom. You can set the display and text size.
So Mark's point is similar to the iPhone, the accessibility features aren't things that would only be of interest to folks who have an accessibility need. A lot of these things are things that might wind up becoming their own features at a future date, which is often what we've seen with the iPhone. Things like the inverse mode and even dark mode started as accessibility as an inverse, you know, invert the screen thing. And then it moved to smart invert and then it became dark mode. I mean, ish.
And so there's things, and again, we'll link to this, but there's voiceover, there's zoom. You can change the text size. You can adjust the amount of motion. You can do sound actions. There are things that you can do with the digital crown.
You can adjust the click speed for it and then adjusting sound and there's things that you can do with the s lady and different per app settings for um things like like text size and and that sort of thing so it it is good to go and take a look at this article uh for all of the things or Or just go dig around in the accessibility settings on Vision Pro, just like we do on our iPhones. And I think maybe that's the message to take away from Mark's tip is accessibility.
Treat this like you would your Mac or your iPhone. Go dig into every setting and see what it changes because there is some level of arbitrariness, if I made up a word, to when Apple puts something in the accessibility features versus when it becomes its own top-level feature in the settings app. And so don't overlook them, which is good advice. I have something on this. Yeah, actually, I saw a YouTube video and I was hoping to find the guy's channel. I thought I subscribed to it.
There's a tech YouTuber who does accessibility and tech. Oh, it's called Equal Accessibility on YouTube and I'll grab the link. But he did. He's, I think, quadriplegic, it looks like.
And so he was doing a review on how accessible is the vision pro and if you look at the first tip the first problem was it's not immediately obvious when you put this thing on, how to turn on the accessibility features from the get-go and the very first tip on this apple's page is you can turn on accessibility features right away when you set up the vision pro but but it doesn't tell you how to. You'd have to know this information ahead of time, first of all, right? There's no prompt.
There's no, you know, like oftentimes with the Mac, if you install your new OS, right, and you boot up the Mac, if you don't do anything, you sit there on the screen, right? It starts doing voiceover. It starts talking to you. Yeah, right. Vision Pro doesn't do this. Secondly, look how you activate the accessibility features immediately.
Triple click the crown, the digital crown. oh how do you do that with no arms or no hands yeah that's it yeah i mean presumably you've you've either figured out a way or had someone help you put the vision pro on your on your face right but then you a lot of folks with no arms and hands can could could even get it on yeah because you can get it on a table and you can manipulate with your feet like there's a lot of ways to to you know yep that's fair yeah huh i did i did have guys like i use
an iphone i have you know all kinds of apple devices and this first device i couldn't use right out of the box so he he wrote to tim cook and and got some replies and things like that so it's an interesting video go watch the video equal accessibility is the youtube channel equal accessibility okay yeah equal accessibility um but yeah and he pointed out like you know even small things like had they they just put the digital crown on the bottom edge instead of the top edge.
They could manipulate with a shoulder or a foot or another limb. Yeah. And the other interesting thing was, um. So another person asked about, you know, what if you only have one eye, does that work? And there is an accessibility setting for setting up your dominant eye, or if you only have one eye, so you can get it to operate with left eye or right eye or so. Ah, that's interesting. Very cool. I did, I did get a chance to do the demo on Saturday.
Uh, I, I stopped, I had, I went down to see a friend on Saturday night in Connecticut and I booked an appointment for midway through my trip to sort of break up the drive. And that 30 minutes goes by fast, folks. Soak it all in. But I was impressed with how intuitive it was. You and I were talking about it a little bit, Adam. There are parts of the interface that are not entirely intuitive. But it's a pretty smooth experience, I found.
I can see if I were spending the same, like if I were spending the same amount of time on planes that I did, you know, 10 years ago the same amount of time in hotel rooms, I would, I would be very compelled to buy it for, for those reasons. I'm sure eventually I will wind up with one of these things at the moment. And here's some good news. What's that Pete? About, about how getting them faster. What's that? At a better price.
Today, the 15th that they were recording, it's the first day that the returns, or the last day of the first people have to return. Oh, yeah. That's right. They will be available on Reverb in theory. So the refurbs should start hitting the stores. Yeah. Yeah, refurb.me. Yeah. Ken Ray was mentioning that on his show. Oh, all right.
Yeah. Go, go book that demo. My, my family, I mentioned it to my, my wife and son, as I was on the way out the door for, for this thing on Saturday night, they were like, yeah, we don't know what we're going to do today. I was like, well, I'm going to stop and do a vision pro demo. They're like, what? I'm like, yeah, you know, I, I, I went on the app and I, I booked it and that's what I'm going to do. Like, well, we want to do that. Like, that's kind of why I mentioned it.
You, you can, like, we have lots of Apple stores around us. So they, they found some open appointments and they went and did it too. Interestingly, they wound up buying each of them wound up buying, not a vision pro, but the latest quest, uh, that same day date. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. My, um, my son had an older quest and had, has been wanting the newer one. And my wife really wanted something, uh, that would allow for an immersive exercise experience at the house.
And the quest has totally delivered on this she's you know every time she's like yeah i gotta go exercise like okay i should spend 20 minutes doing this 45 minutes later you know she's worked up a full sweat and forgot about the amount of time that that went by like she you know she plays a boxing game or something but it's all like fitness games i know the fitness stuff is coming to vision pro the quest is also 500 bucks um so you know yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't want to get You get
a $4,000 piece of equipment sweaty. But they mentioned that they were going to go look at the quests. And then I saw an alert on my phone that two new six gigahertz Wi-Fi devices had joined our network. And I sent the notification home like, looks like you guys did some shopping. The other thing to point out with the quest is that it does support now spatial...
Video and photos from yes your iphone 15 oh it does i didn't realize that oh they added support for for the spatial video and photos oh well then i need to check this out oh oh man all right cool well i got those videos you sent me pete so i uh yeah yeah like i like i said and then oh and they did fix the the latest update pete by the way yeah fixed the immersive uh video problem that i had where you would have the small window
and then you'd go into immersive mode and you'd still have a small window with the haze around it now it goes full.
Full view oh nice oh okay you still get a little white haze edge but it puts you into the into the space like i was expecting it to from the get-go so i don't know why they launched it the way they did or yeah right yeah whatever the first they may not they may not have realized until they went oh this ain't working like we advertised yeah yeah yeah you know whoops whoops all right back to uh we might as well finish out the quick tips we actually do have some uh a couple more long tip
vision pro tip well it was a discussion pete it's okay we take tangents and and we reserve that right in fact i think if we didn't take tangents this show would be less interesting to listen to you can let us know what you think about that though feedback at mackie cab.com we we do try to make the show for you you heard him feedback at mackie cab.com stop what you're doing right now and send it that's right, Feedback at Mac. Then hit play again. Then hit play again. That's right.
Dan shares in reaction to my tip in the last or our tip in the last episode. He says, he says, when John was talking about putting his printer on a smart switch, I thought he was going to share for a different reason. That being to be able to restart the device easily and remotely. He says, I have my TV on a light. I have a TV light strip on one because occasionally they stop responding to their timer or the remote.
A simple restart and they're back to working as normal. But some things are difficult to get. It's difficult to get to the plug where it fits into the wall of the power strip if it's behind a desk or other furniture. It says I also have one on my Optimum Altice box, too, so I can restart it without even getting up. I need to put one of these on my new NVIDIA Shield because this has happened. I told you I've been running that thing for like two weeks. It's all we use, and we love it.
Except my family hasn't figured out that the way that works best to turn it off is to just touch the power button on the remote. One quick press turns off the TV and the shield and everything's good. If they hold down the power button, as it was evident they did on Saturday night, because when I got home on Sunday, I saw this symptom and was the same was true when I had a band rehearsal earlier in the week. It won't turn on if they hold down the power button until the thing turns off.
The only way I've found to get it to come back on is to power cycle it. There might be another way, if you know, again, feedback at MacEcap.com. But uh uh so putting a putting a extra smart switch on the shield would perhaps just be my solutions because otherwise pete i have to get up off the couch like walk all the way across the room like a caveman i i don't even understand why it's 2024 why did we why are we in 2024 if i have to get up off the couch to to do
this what was that kids movie where the robots were all waiting It was a cartoon. WALL-E? I think that was it, yeah. Everybody's fat and they're just laying around drinking milkshakes. Yeah, yeah. The robots are waiting on them. I know that that's not where I want to go. However, there are moments in the day where that is where I want to be. Yes. Right. Exactly.
Another day, we need to get into my theory about Pixar and Apple's relationship and how Pixar movies predict the future of what Apple is going to do. I mean, you've tugged on the thread or you've, you've presented the thread, Adam. What, what, what is there more to your theory here? No. So like, you know, Wally is like our future. And if you look at the progression of screens to where we are today with the vision pro, that's about one step further, right?
We're in our little floating chairs and communicating to the person next to us, looking at a a display that's in this case probably going to be more projected in your eye but there's that and there was there was the whole you know ipad sort of thing in the incredibles slipping out of a yellow manila envelope before steve jobs did the original macbook air announcement with the manila envelope and there's a lot of parallels that go and just like what are where some of those
ideas came from you know yeah well i mean the the uh the star trek definitely predicted or paved the way for a lot of technology that we that we use today or in it like invented, conceptualized i guess is really the the right term to use right there you go yeah because they didn't invent the communicator anything they just they built a plastic thing right that they treated like it worked but that like those things but if you remember the communicator was line of sight.
They couldn't communicate if the ship was there were times we'll get what the communicator was out of range you're right sort of thing yeah you call anywhere on the globe with your iphone in theory yeah especially now with the uh sat satcom right that's right in the 15 and then uh you know the tricorder oh there's something wrong with your, I want tricorders. That, I think, I mean, I'm not, I know I'm not the only one, but yeah. And then Dick Tracy, of course, had the smartwatch.
Right. Phone calls. Yes, commissioner. Yep. Yeah. And I, you know, I know I talked about the ultra on a recent episode. I feel like the ultra really is the first Apple watch that feels like a Dick Tracy watch. Like it just does all the things I was able to easily type on, on the onscreen QWERTY keyboard the other day. I needed to add a weather location because I was going down to Connecticut and I wanted to put the town I was going in and I was like how can I do this on my watch?
It's like there's a keyboard oh good luck and I just tapped it out not nary a fat finger happened.
I'm pretty good with the little draw the letters one I love that I use it all the time to respond to texts it works great it's graffiti about things like it's graffiti yeah exactly yeah from the palm it's bad about things so if you want a semicolon or something it'll give you an exclamation point yeah yeah you know that that drives me nuts it's like oh come on i appreciate that you find it important enough to correctly use a semicolon when scratching out a sentence
on your watch that that alone is part of why i love Love you, Pete. Actually, the problem with that thing is that they're not using graffiti because that was the genius with graffiti because you had certain gestures and swipes. The one that I really miss from graffiti was you'd sort of do a backwards down tick and then swipe back and then it would delete backwards. Yes, yes, right. Yeah. So the question that brings me to, is anal retentive hyphenated?
Oh man uh adam a friend you yeah yeah one of my friends uh you have a quick one yes i have a quick tip from terry i resemble that remark pete yeah terry has a really quick one for the vision pro he says you can have multiple safari windows on the vision pro all you have to do is open the sidebar to show the tabs that little sidebar button we're all familiar with in safari and And then drag the title of the tab out to be another window.
So you can have all your Windows Safari browsers all around you. You can do 360 if you want. You could leave ones in other rooms if you want and come back to them later. It's true. I, uh, it, it, he sent us a video, which I've linked to in the show notes. So you, you folks can see it too. Uh, if you are having trouble from that description, uh, Terry does a great job. Terry's a lifelong educator. It's not, it's no surprise that his quick little
video illustrates this perfectly, but yeah, it's pretty good. Yeah. I was, I was having trouble with tabs just yesterday in there. Cause I was like, Oh, I've got a, it's like, you have seven tabs open. I'm like, okay, how do I close my tabs? And I went over to the tab thing and I got the tab view where all my tabs came out as windows. And I was like, they don't have the little circle on them. Like, why don't you have the little circle on them so I can close them?
And that was really frustrating me. And I was like, I've spent a little while figuring it out.
And then I realized like, when you look at the, where you would open the tabs thing it drops down the tab bar and then you can see all your tabs and then you can view them and click between them but if you do the pinch and hold thing it will give you the contextual menu so you can actually like close yeah yeah yeah it like like i said folks if if you have an apple store within driving distance of you go do this demo you're going to I think it's going to be important
to at least understand the mechanics of how this Vision Pro works. Even if you don't have the latest iPhone or you don't have the latest Mac, you understand how a keyboard works, how a trackpad works, how a mouse works. You probably understand how touch works and pinch and zoom on an iPhone. Phone, spending the 30 minutes with a Vision Pro will give you all of that with the Vision Pro so you can understand this new paradigm that the world is kind of, you know, dabbling in.
One other thing Terry mentioned on the Vision Pro in that video was kind of a bonus quick tip. He keeps a clock, the clock app up permanently kind of off to his right. And he just casually mentioned it as his glance, you know, moved past it. He's like, oh, yeah. And, you know, to the right of my clock, which I keep up all the time so I can see what time it is. I have another Safari window or whatever. And, you know, he was just showing these.
I was like, right. Right. That is one thing I missed in my Vision Pro demo. I had I mentioned the time went by very quickly because I had no idea what time it was. And it is a different world that you're in in there. I mean, it's it's augmented reality, but it's different. And so when he was like, all right, and you're done, I was like, whoa, OK. And I mean, I looked at my watch. I was like, you are correct. Like we are done. But wow. OK.
So, yeah. have that clock up. Otherwise, you know, you'll get on that, uh, that rabbit hole. It'd be like being in a casino. That was interesting. Yeah. Interesting. You brought up the clock thing. Cause I was doing that just this morning. I was like doing some stuff on the vision pro. And I was like. What time is it? Yeah. So I was like, well, I just asked S lady and it pops up, which is great, right in front of you.
So that was the easy way. And then I was like, why is there not some sort of clock? And the only other way that I figured out how to do it without using a dedicated app or widget or something like that, you can go up to the control center. Which you get to by looking up. And then this little down arrow appears and then you can tap that. And the clock is in the control center along with your battery and all that other stuff.
That's oh i wish i had known that because i i would have looked at the clock a few times during the demo so yeah yeah yeah so now you can change go ahead yeah there's a setting also to change like how far up you have to look before you see the little control center icon too so you can mess with that in your settings yep is is there any light coming in from below in other words if you had your arm against can you look down at your watch i
could have your watch for me there there was light coming in under like around my nose um i noticed it at first and he said if it becomes an issue we can work and address that but it was clear he didn't want to spend all our demo time on it and and it like that was the last time i thought about it until this very moment when you asked this like it's just not a big deal yeah there's a little light leak around the nose that's about the only place where i do get
to i do get light leak and i have another other quick tip just on comfort um i'm learning that you can get it to be a lot more comfortable and wear it a lot longer i know a lot of people are complaining about the weight by like either moving the positioning of the band so like the solo loop initially you want to put it like around the back of your head i find and other people have mentioned if you move it just up a little bit higher it feels like it might slip off but
it's not going to slip off um just higher up on on your head. It pulls the weight off of the top of your forehead. And then the other thing is, is like when you first put it on, you feel like you want to crank that dial. Like you really want to like cinch it in. Don't cinch it in. It doesn't need to be super tight. And that makes it a lot more comfortable as well. So now people aren't going to return them, Adam.
They're going to be comfortable in them. All right, Bill brings us our next quick tip courtesy of Bill. So let's see if we can get this to play. Hello, Dave, Pilot Pete, and Adam. This is Bill from Menlo Park, California. I have a quick tip here. For those of us who did not grow up in Unix land and are not programmers, but who occasionally need to use the terminal, we are often told to use the man command to view the manual for a particular Unix or iOS command.
But when we do, we see that man file in a dorky text editor that is for normal people a pain. I can never remember how to close out of it. It's control something or another. There is a better way to look at man pages. Onyx, in its Utilities section, includes a Manuals Reader. It lets you open whatever man page you want, scroll it back and forth, and read the details.
One quirk is you do have to double-click on the command name in the left column to open a particular manual, and it doesn't have a search function. However, you can easily search through a large single manual by opening it in Preview, which is just a one click away. So you don't have to have two terminal windows open, one on man and one on a command line, and fiddling around. You can use Onyx to see those man pages.
I think this might be helpful to anyone who only occasionally visits the terminal. Take care and don't get caught. Hey, folks, let's talk about upgrades. Not for your tech, but for you. Yes, you. With our sponsor, HIMSS, you can skip the waiting room and pharmacy lines. Think of it as the Apple pay of men's health care, fast, convenient, and no contact required.
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Then find and book a top rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash M-G-G ZocDoc dot com slash M-G-G And our thanks to ZocDoc for sponsoring this episode Alright, let's do some questions, shall we? Pete, you want to take us to Mike? I can do that Yeah, Mike writes in and asks Hi guys, can you remind me of one of your current recommendations For a network audio appliance with an 1-8 inch stereo audio jack that is AirPlay 2 compatible, similar to the old features of the Airport Express.
I want to repurpose some decent but old speakers and add them to my home kit setup. Thanks, Mike. And I think, is that a three millimeter for those on the metric system? I think so. I just call it a headphone jack. Yeah, it's a mini headphone jack. Yeah, not a quarter inch headphone jack. Yeah, exactly. The good news is we've had this conversation on the show before without a whole lot of great answers. There are some great answers now. There's two companies that I would recommend
and feel comfortable recommending and look at for this. One is Belkin. They make what they call the SoundForm Connect AirPlay 2 adapter. It's 89 bucks on Amazon. It has both...
The headphone analog audio out that you know the mini headphone jack whatever size you want to call that it's also got the toss link optical out on it and of course uh yep it and it's got you know it's wi-fi this one does 16 bit and 44.1 uh kilohertz sound which is cd quality sound we can argue the merits of having something more powerful than that but i don't think you need it uh for for what you're doing there. So there is that.
Then there's another company that you might not be as familiar with, WIM, W-I-I-M. They make two things. One is what they call their WIM Mini, which is their AirPlay 2 wireless audio streamer. It has the same TOSLINK optical out.
It's got your headphone optical out. It's also got an aux in, in uh and uh and it will you know kind of kind of let you take any sound you want and pass it through to those speakers so it becomes sort of your hub and of course it is uh airplay capable as as well as letting you know the other sound in through its uh through its its sound input port It also is $89 and available on Amazon. So we've got a link for that. And then there is the WIM Pro, and there's even the WIM Pro Plus or something.
Yeah, the WIM Pro Plus, which comes with a remote and things like that.
This, the difference between the WIM and the WIM Pro Plus is that the Pro and Pro Plus us support ethernet chromecast the amazon a lady multi-room and other output types so again for what you're doing the 89 win mini would probably be totally fine uh the win pro is 149 the win pro plus i think is 219 but uh you get some more outputs you get uh stereo rca line outs and line in, you get SP TOS link, the optical input and output, again, Ethernet, some of those things.
But if all you're looking for is AirPlay 2, then the WIM Mini or the Belkin Soundform Connect would be the answer there. Those are my thoughts on it. Any thoughts, Adam? Well, maybe I'm naive because I haven't looked at the products in a while, but I used to like, I mean, they're more pricey, but the stuff from Audio Engine, don't they do a couple like adapters? I think it's called the B-Fi or the B-1 or something like that. Yeah. Did they still do an AirPlay capable adapter?
That's the part I didn't know. That's the part I didn't know. Okay. So I hesitated to bring it up in response to AirPlay 2. I know they used to play nice with AirPlay back in the day. I had one of the like B1s or something like that. The B1 is Bluetooth only. That I know for sure. But there is the B5 that you also mentioned. And I believe the B5, it is still available. And does it do? It says AirPlay.
It does say it has AirPlay but I don't know if it's AirPlay 2 oh right, yeah it does say AirPlay for the B5 so and it's pricey if it's not AirPlay 2 yeah exactly it's $189 they use really high end DACs and stuff like that, right so that wouldn't be backward compatible, um it would be but not for the multi room stuff right AirPlay 2 adds the multi room yeah um so and you might want that depending on how you're going to do things in your home yeah but you
know these things go ahead adam i was just saying the reality is reality for me i was going to bring this up too is that like i and the reason i don't know is because once i got home pods for audio i don't i don't really use anything else or i use sonos or i use you know, my home pods so i'm kind of out of the loop on the little adapters for doing.
Yeah. Airplay 2. I, um, I looked at these because I was using Airplay 2 more with Sonos and other devices because I, like Mike, I had some speakers that it was like, well, if I could put an adapter on these, I now have another sound output source that's compatible with the rest of my system. Right. Right. So there's an argument that if you are a, you know, mostly HomePod household, one of these things is perhaps even more relevant for you.
Right. Like, I mean, for 89 bucks, you're not that far off from from buying a HomePod. So, you know, you are HomePod mini. Right. What's a HomePod mini now? They're 99 bucks. You probably can get refurbs for cheaper. Yeah. So, you know, you're, yeah, it's 99 bucks. Yeah. So like, but if you've got a set of, you know, desktop speakers that are stereo that you can put really nice. Yeah.
Six feet apart from each other or something and run them off of one of these, but you've already got the speakers. You paid 89 bucks and now you've got a stereo pair as opposed to just one HomePod mini. So, uh, you know, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Good stuff. Thanks, Mike. Mike, you made me research this, Mike, and I was happy to find things that solved this problem because, like I said, the last time we researched this, it was like there were… There wasn't much out there.
There was off-brand Chinese stuff that would always look the same, but every time we looked at it, it was from a different name of a manufacturer. And I was like, God, do I really want to recommend this on the show? And maybe it's the same manufacturer making these for Belkin and Wim I don't know it could very well be but at least they're supported by brands that. You have a really good chance of getting good support from. So yeah, a little bit of a history.
So, all right. Uh, you want to take us to, I'll say left when I think we're pronouncing your name left when left when, or Leo, when, yep. Uh, says, Hey, I know MGG is transition transitioned from Evernote sad, but I've ignored Evernote for years. Now I've been paying the 70 bucks or so annual subscription just to keep a ton of legacy data handy. and I've needed to pull a few obscure items from back in the day when I kept everything in Evernote. I think a lot of us did.
This week, they informed me that the subscription price is almost doubling to 130 bucks. Ouch. So I've canceled it as of March 6th. It was a luxury to keep around for rare archive digging occasions, but this is now a ridiculous cost for a once or twice a year thing. But I canceled without really thinking about it ahead of time. So help, please. I've logged into Evernote online to cancel and see that all my notes are still there.
I haven't even installed a new version of Evernote on my M2 MacBook Pro, and I don't really want to at this point. However, there doesn't seem to be a way to export my data from the web interface only via a Mac or Windows client. Any ideas? Or do I have to go through the hassle of the app update to save my data? And any insight on what the export sport format looks like and works with. Yes. In fact, yes to all of those questions. So let's move on. No, no, no, no, no.
The answer is, is yes, I have been through this. Right. We, as you remember, left when we used to use Evernote because it was a note app that allowed cloud syncing among multiple people. And that solved the problem of us having access to the same library for when we're doing this. In fact, in years past, your question would have been prepared by me into Evernote and Adam would have read it out of Evernote.
I know Adam wasn't part of MGG years ago, but just go with me on this. uh now we did that same thing with notes right and and i put it into notes and adam just read it out of notes getting things your your history from evernote to notes is thankfully very easy going the other direction not so easy but uh apple evernote will export your entire entire set of notes into E N E X format and Apple's notes app will import E N E X format. So it truly is built to do this.
The other yes that I was answering is in fact, yes, you have to download the Mac app to do this. The good news is, uh, you can run the old Evernote legacy app and the new Evernote app on the same Mac at the same time. They will maintain contain their own copies of your same synced Evernote database. It works great. We did that for a long time because Apple script support does not exist in the new Evernote app. So we would use the old one to put notes into it because we could script that process.
And then we would use the new one to read it because it was a better reading experience. So it all didn't matter. It was all kind of the same and, uh, and works well, but yeah, you're going to have to download the app. It's a temporary thing Download it. Export, pull it into notes, and you should be good to go. But yes, your note made me think, I think I'm on the free plan. The left one's fine. He can just go to the free plan. The only problem is he
won't be able to upload lots of new data. I am wrong about that assumption. The free plan allows you to have up to 50 notes and one notebook. Now, I should share how they articulate that. They say create up to 50 notes and one notebook. I think if you scale down from a plan that let you create more down to the free plan, I think you will keep all of your notes. But that is a guess. And please don't use my guess as the foundation of a future workflow that matters to you. Export this stuff out.
Get it into notes. Get it into something. If you have a Synology disk station, they have Note Station, which is an app that you can install on there. That also, not only will it import an ENEX file, it will sync with your Evernote database. You just log it in and it will slurp it all down. That's another way to do it. And they have iOS and Mac apps for that too. So I'm probably going to do one more sync of Evernote just to make sure I have my data in several places.
But I think it will stick around. I just won't be able to add any more, but I won't know until June because I was also on the annual plan, but I am not anymore. I've moved to the free plan. So come June, I'll be able to speak to this. This is like a slow motion Sherlock there over at Evernote. I mean, kind of, yeah. I feel bad for him, but it's, uh, well, it's just taken over. It's cross platform that. Sure. Right. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. So if you need to collaborate.
Um, it is one way to do it, but there's also Microsoft OneNote, which I think winds up being cheaper, especially if you're getting it as part of other microsoft things that you're buying and that's cross-platform again sonology note station cross-platform so and you see their need to raise prices as people are leaving yes yeah it's yeah chicken and egg chicken and egg problem or egg and chicken problem i guess because it's the other way around but i mean i
think i know i think i know what the title of the episode was i thought it was going to be something about the importance of the semicolon but uh the egg and chicken problem is about as good as it's ever going to get i think so i i also think this is actually turns out to be a good time to talk about that thing that i want to talk about since it relates to app pricing yes yes a little bit of an audible jumping ahead one but yeah yeah
so this came up for me with the vision pro because i'm you know i'm trying to use the vision pro i'm trying to figure out you know what's the use case for this what can i do and obviously games is one of those things that you want to do, but just apps in general. So there's a general... I think I mentioned this last time, right? That it needs more apps, but it's early days. So it's just like early days of the iPhone. But I'm constantly going into the app store to look for apps.
A big problem right now is that the discovery is not very good because there are a lot of Vision Pro apps, but Apple only highlights a few of them. And it's really hard to find... Like a section that's just like, show me all the Vision Pro apps. I haven't found it on the app store yet. You can't filter? Well, maybe. Okay.
Okay. I haven't found it in the Vision Pro app store. You know, you can look through and they have categories and you can see all the categories, you know, like here's the new stuff, but it stops after a few. I want just a place where I can see like a full list of all the Vision Pro apps, you know, like 600 of them. But I don't know.
I digress. You can search for them and then it'll show you this is Vision Pro versus iPad, you know, but you have to know what you're searching for sure though you know i want to browse anyway i digress so i was going through and looking for things to try out and i came across this game i pulled it up over here hopefully i still got no i closed the tab of course it's called um.
Noom noom i'm gonna get it wrong now i had it up earlier um but it's this you know it's like a 3d app and you basically it's kind of like a puzzle it creates this 3d environment and you find little pieces of the 3d model and you kind of reassemble the model and it gets more complex as you go and it's got a bunch of levels and stuff like that and i saw that it was available for free download, with in-app purchase and so i looked at the in-app in-app purchase on it and um Um,
it was like, you know, cause I, I always am curious, you know, what, what is, if I want the full version of this, cause it's basically you get one, one. Sure. Like level or whatever you call it. One puzzle is like the demo. And if you want the other nine and they're going to add more as time goes on, uh, if you want the other nine, you've got to pay, you know, in a purchase. And I'm like, okay, so what is it? It's like $9.99. And it's like,
Oh, that's not too bad. If it's a really good game and I like it. Um, great. great and uh so i downloaded it i tried the first thing and i'm like oh this is actually pretty cool because like once you've built this like diorama thing basically you can scale it up and you can kind of walk through it and like experience it and all that sort of stuff um and uh i was like okay it's great i'll i'll pay the 10 bucks you know and i went to go do the in-app purchase and it's.
$10 a month. Yeah, that's different. Yeah. $120 a year. So I don't know if it's just because they realize, like, again, like early days of the iPhone, remember there was like some crazy priced apps. And I'm not against subscription models. Sure, no, you never have been. Had it been $1.99 or $2.99, I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, that's fine. Like, I'll pay that because it's actually, I recognize the amount of work that went into this.
It's really well built it's immersive it's really it's really entertaining and relaxing and fun it's it's kind of meant to be more of a relaxing kind of game it's not really difficult you know you see the pieces and you kind of drag them down and just give me the name of the game one more time adam let me i i need to actually look okay all right time to go into my into my browser history because i had a hard time finding it too okay well
we can just put it in the show notes it's totally fine i'll i'll get it i'll definitely get it for you if you give me a second because i definitely had had it pulled up here uh luna l-o-o-n-a okay okay yep cool all right so yeah and it's this spatial spatial puzzle game i had the link and i can get you the link to it or you can find the link yeah it's called it's called luna and so like i went and looked at the reviews and then there's
a bunch of people obviously they're like this is a great game this pricing is crazy and it sounds like they brought it down because earlier reviews were saying it was initially 20 bucks a month oh wow okay yeah and you know 240 a year for a game that's like a game platform like i don't know like again if they're just thinking well if people are willing to pay 3500 for the thing they're going to be willing to pay a lot more for software and you know i don't want
to admonish this developer because i do i recognize the amount of work that goes absolutely i think developers should get paid. Yep. But like, if this is going to be the pricing model for apps on Vision Pro, that's insanity. Like, I just had to point that out. It's like, so I almost left a review, but, you know, I didn't want to like, because it's really well designed and it's a really beautiful game, but, They could lower the price to $3 a week, then it's only $156 a year.
So instead of leaving a review, we'll just share it with about 50,000 people here and let that ripple. No, but these are important conversations to have. And I always do this, but anytime we mention a product, service, company, anyone on the show. I always try to let the principals or the PR people or whatever know so that they can hear the conversation if they want.
And and i think hopefully they would agree that they want to hear this even though it might not be what they want to hear yeah you know yeah yeah i mean and if it was console game priced like you know 50 60 bucks for a whole app yeah like that i'd even be okay with that and that sounds pricey but like if you bought a video game for your playstation or your xbox or whatever your pc you're gonna pay that yep so that seems perfectly reasonable you know
in terms of our price but But well, like my wife. $40 a year, it's like, I'll go, I'll go buy an Xbox and get a bunch of other games for my wife has a fitness app. All of the apps on, uh, on the, the quest, at least all the ones she's encountered allow essentially a 14 day trial period. You buy the app and then you can return it and get your money back in the first 14 days.
As long as a it's 14 days or less and b you've used the app for less than two hours and i like that idea uh because it really does let you you've got to commit to wanting to try it you've paid for it it's up to you to to do the return it's you know so the if you just go with momentum you will you will have paid for it and then you will keep it and that's it but you know if you're if you're diligent about it obviously you can easily manage
that process uh but there is one app that she's using for fitness that she thinks she's going to stick with. And after that 14 days, it then is like either 10 bucks a month or a hundred bucks a year. But they are adding new it's kind of like Apple Fitness where they're adding new classes all the time and different things so that you're not six months from now hearing exactly the same instructor say exactly the same thing over and over again.
And and, you know, getting bored with it. So, like, in that sense, I get it.
It's and it's way cheaper than a gym membership. ship in fact she she canceled she's been talking about whether or not it's worth it for her to pay like the hundred bucks a month to her yoga studio that that she'd been going to and hadn't really been uh finding time to go to and so this for 500 bucks plus another 100 bucks a year that's six months of yoga and now then then it's paid for so yeah yeah i mean in this app again to be fair they're
planning on adding new levels and continuing to add things so i get the subscription I just think that's a lot for a game. That's a little heavy. Yeah. Yeah. I agree in my opinion, but you know, maybe I'm wrong. I agree. Yeah. I mean, well, like time will tell. So, um, yeah, time, time will tell. Uh, all right. James asks us, he says, um. Eventually and soon I'm going to ditch my late 2018 Mac mini, uh, and get a higher-end MacBook Pro.
I've determined that I would benefit greatly from the mobility and, of course, the speed improvements and all of that good stuff. While in my office, though, my intention will be to maintain a similar effective setup to what I have now, dual 4K displays and multiple USB accessories. The safe assumption is that the yet-to-be-released MacBook Pro that I will eventually buy will have less total ports than my current desktop machine. That's probably fair.
So additional Aptors, ports, hubs, dongles will be needed. And he says, yes, I'm already on my Mac Mini using every port that's there, plus a couple of dongles. My question for my future self and for all of us is whether it would be better to utilize a single Thunderbolt hub that connects to all of my external devices, something like the CalDigit TS4 or the OWC Thunderbolt 4 hub, or to employ separate and distinct adapters.
For example, possibly, you know, one hub for my external SSDs and microphones and then use a different Thunderbolt adapter for my external displays in combination possibly with the Max HDMI port. Focusing my question, will connecting two displays and multiple USB devices to the same hub and therefore the same port on my Mac negatively affect SSD speeds as all of those devices are sharing a single Thunderbolt ports bandwidth?
Would it be better, purely from a bandwidth perspective, to instead spread those across the multiple ports that I am hoping my future MacBook Pro will still have? Is each port a separate bus? I don't mind plugging two to three wires in regularly if it improves performance. What do you guys think? You want to start this one, Adam? Yeah, there's a lot in this and you're probably going to be better, a little bit better than me at unpacking this.
But like to simply answer the questions from what my knowledge is like, right? Different max like the the bus question different max have different buses which is like why things like the macbook air i think still only support one external display yeah maybe two i can't remember there's like there's like a limit yeah um and in terms of like having multiple things on the same bus i know that can affect performance i don't know how much i think like ssds and those those sorts of things.
And Thunderbolt itself has a lot of bandwidth. So it often puzzles me where people get a little bit worried about this, but I know there's a lot of people that are like, I want maximum throughput to my external SSDs all the time. I don't want anything slowing that down. And I get that. I don't operate at that level. I'm not doing high-end video and all those sorts of things. So I think, yeah, it all depends on... I think it comes down to how you want your setup.
Up like for me i know i i haven't gone to thunderbolt monitors yet and one of the reasons i haven't is because i want everything on a single cable like i love the convenience of just having one cable that plugs into my macbook pro and everything's connected to a hub and with my displays i want to daisy chain my displays and there aren't that many displays on the market that have underbolt coming in and then a thunderbolt out so you can go to another monitor including apples
by the way yeah um which is baffling to me so like i know i think uh that there's like one or two companies that make them and i've looked at them and i just haven't pulled the trigger on a on a like 4k 5k display yet but because i want to and i i want to daisy chain them so that's where i'm at with it like i i prefer just everything one hub um and hooking it up that way but i don't worry about maximum throughput on all my.
Yeah, I'm I'm kind of the same as you kind of here in the studio is probably a great example because I'm running a Mac studio, which has, I believe, four Thunderbolt buses. Right. And so I have optimized things because why not? It's not a portable machine. It like it. Once I plug it in, I kind of forget about it, which is sort of the point. You know, I come up here and I turn it on and I'm good to go. So, but I do have three monitors connected to this and only, it only has one HDMI port.
So I am using an HDMI port for one and I have done tests both with this machine and the machine I had up here prior. That was also a Thunderbolt Mac, uh, where running, if I plug a, you know, Thunderbolt hub into one of the Thunderbolt ports and then put an SSD, uh, off of that hub and then Then a monitor also off of that hub, which you can do because, you know, a lot of these Thunderbolt docks will have certainly many of them now with Thunderbolt four and and support hubbing. Right.
So you can have multiple Thunderbolt ports, but they also support their they might have their own HDMI or their own USB-C output that supports a USB-C monitor. Right. Because those exist, not Thunderbolt monitors, but USB-C monitors or DisplayPort or whatever, you know, the Thunderbolt dock might have. Hooking up two monitors to a Thunderbolt dock and then an SSD.
I noticed that my write speeds, not my read speeds, but my write speeds to that SSD go down or conversely go up when I remove the monitors because those monitors are a constant, require a constant digital stream of data going to them. It's kind of how it works. When you stop and think about it, it makes a lot of sense, right? Right. So I have compartmentalized things up here in the studio so that my I have I keep one this this Mac studio that I got is the base model M1 Mac studio.
Right. And it's great. It's awesome. But that meant that it's got 32 gigs of unified memory, which is awesome. And 512 gigs of SSD space, which is fine, but not awesome. And certainly not the amount that I need. So I have an OWC Envoy drive that hangs off of this and lives there full time. And it is plugged into one of the Thunderbolt ports, which on this means one of the Thunderbolt buses. And that is entirely dedicated to that drive because I save lots of things on
it. In fact, if memory serves, I think I even save the audio for the show directly to that drive. If I don't, it gets archived there or something. I don't know. I forget. It doesn't matter. I manage my storage so that I'm not over utilizing that precious 512 gigs on the boot drive. And then I have a separate Thunderbolt hub that feeds my other two or Thunderbolt dock. It might even be USB dock. I can't remember. But that feeds my other two monitors.
And that's dedicated. And then I have one that's like dedicated to like the various peripherals that I'm going to plug in the kind of random things. And that also includes my audio interface, which is Thunderbolt. And so I want that to be prioritized. And so I have thought about how to best manage this. Am I getting full speed?
Well, I am with the drive that I care about. out but other than that I'm sure I've got some things that are in theory not perfectly engineered but, I've got enough headroom on the bandwidth of these Thunderbolt buses that it doesn't actually matter. Like none of these devices would soak up enough to impact the others.
So, but it is something to think about. And, and, and what you really, the question going back to James specifically that you need to ask is how many buses, not ports, but how many Thunderbolt buses does that MacBook pro that doesn't yet exist have you're right, Adam, the MacBook. Air has one thunderbolt bus in it the macbook pros the ones with i am and it keeps changing so i'm gonna get this wrong but at one point in time and this may be that point in time.
The macbook pros with two thunderbolt ports had one bus and with four thunderbolt ports or three thunderbolt ports had two buses and it was you had to learn which was which i think it was split by side but i might be wrong on that but like you can look in the specs and you can look in system profiler and like see those things and you get to even see in system profiler it'll show you here's what's connected to this thunderbolt bus here's what's connected to this one and
absolutely even if you think like me you know i've got four ports i know exactly where everything is why just look system profiler will confirm it for you you're either right or wrong you want to know so yeah it's a wonderful little tool there's a great point about um you know the the difference between there is the difference between a notebook, right? The convenience of having that one cable versus a desktop where, you know, Hey, this thing's never moving.
I can plug all four ports in and I don't care. I don't care. In fact, it would be, I didn't have all four of them plugged in at first. I got this machine up and running. This was one of those machines that I had to replace this past summer, basically in an emergency after that lightning strike to the, to the house or whatever. And, uh. And so I just plugged it in. I got it up and working. And then a month and a half later I was in system profiler for some other reason.
And I was like, wait a minute, I have two Thunderbolt buses. I'm not using at all. Uh, I think I'm going to change that, you know? So every, you know, I spent the 20 minutes to re-engineer it and was like, yep. Okay. And now I, I, I think I got it right when I just articulated it before, but let's assume I did. It doesn't matter. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I got a question. from my daughter this morning. This might be a geek challenge or you might just have the answer, one of you guys.
She says, is there any way to pair two sets of AirPods to one iPad? She says her fiance and her taking a train ride, I think to Milan or Verona or something this weekend and they both want to watch a movie on the same iPad. How do you do it? Is that possible? I seem to think that it is, but I literally got this text while we were recording. And so, uh, uh.
Yeah how to pair two sets of airpods with the same iphone i think it is possible for the movie watching scenario though though can't you just share the audio yes.
Like to another set of airpods yeah one person i think that's it i know you can do that if that's the movie scenario but they're not i mean that's not when i think pairing i'm thinking like i have I have two sets of AirPods right paired to my Mac and I bring this one over and that connects and then later I bring this one over and then that one connects. But you can share the audio. I know you can share audio for music app and movies and things like that.
I think it's limited to certain scenarios, though. You are correct. For what they want to do, I think it is doable. I found an article at HowToGeek that I'll put in the show notes about this and I will also text to her. But yeah, when you bring another set of AirPods close to a device that is playing audio, and I can confirm this because I see it on planes all the time, you know, I'll be watching a movie and it'll be like, do you want to pair Susie's AirPods?
And you click the button like, these are not your AirPods, you know. No, thank you.
But once you do that then you use the uh it looks as though you use the airplay button in control center uh to to decide how everything's going to go and you get to check the boxes next to both of these sets of airpods that are now connected to your device so yeah i think this is i think this is going to be doable for them well that's good news thanks for my question i was thinking it It was Apple TV only that could do it.
And then Uncle Jamie mentioned in Discord that it's, what's the word he used? Inconvenient. Yes. Yeah, it's weird to do it on Apple TV. I will agree. It is possible, but it's. It kind of sucks. Yeah. Yeah. It's a weird process.
All right uh how are we doing here on time you know let's read tony's question no i want i want adam to take us to cool stuff found because porthos john has kind of a cool one we've done a lot of vision pro stuff this episode so we might as well kind of kind of stick with that and then and then we'll do tony uh in next week's episode okay yeah yeah yeah so porthos john John actually is solving a problem that I thought about the same thing.
And he says, one of the things on the design side that I lament on with the Apple Vision Pro is the same as VR headsets as well. And that is there's nothing that covers or protects the internal lenses, including your snap in prescription or, you know, lenses and stuff like that. So the lenses are open. They give you that nice cover for the front.
They do not give you any kind of cover for like the inside. And I don't know if they think just because it's kind of naturally protected by the face shield thing, but you know, dust and dirt and things can get in there. And so he said, I reverted to something that I used on my digital cameras for years, a lens pen. And if you don't know what a lens pen is, it's like, it looks like a fat like marker and you pop the end off and it has a little articulating.
Well, there's a couple of different ways that this one you're showing Dave showing on the video has a slide out where you push it out in a little.
Like a mechanical pencil might we might slide it out yeah it comes out the end of it i have one where you pop it off and it has a little pad with an articulating kind of thing and you would use it for your digital camera to get in and like clean off the lenses or the sensors or stuff like that it's you know it's a lens cleaning cloth but in pen form and he says you can spend 10 bucks on a lens pen or 25 on a full cleaning kit but they have
a non-scratch carbon head that makes your your glass super clear again you don't ever clean the uh apple you don't ever clean the apple visual vision pro internals with a rag or a towel they can scratch and they also tend to leave debris and fibers so yeah these little lens pens are great and again camera enthusiasts have used them for years and know about them i have one because i have a telescope and it came with a kit with the you know, a telescope that I bought for.
And, you know, the, the problem I always thought was like, even if you try to use a cloth, which, you know, as he says, you probably shouldn't do. Um, getting down in there, you know, it's, it's kind of a reach. I guess you could pop off the face shield. I never thought about that just now. Like that thing comes off pretty easy. It's magnetically attached so you can get at them more easily that way. But yeah, lens pens are great.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I've, I've heard about them with, uh, like for binoculars and, and that's a, also a good way of thinking about this. Cause they're the vision pro optically shares some things with binoculars. Yeah. Yeah. So the question I have, Adam, uh, is have you sniffed that pen? Is it alcohol? There's, there's, there's no fluid or anything on it. It's, it's a dry thing. Okay. Like he said, it's got a special, it's got a special tip.
On it so yeah yeah basically you don't want you don't want to drag especially with lenses you don't want to drag even micro fine particles just like across that you want something that's going to pick that stuff up so i'm not supposed to use the bottom of my shirt uh to clean these things like i do with my glasses paper towels dave paper towels oh my gosh oh no no no oh man that hurts Windex and paper towels. Yeah. Oh, man.
We actually, our HUD glass, which you've seen pictures of, in fact, the video I sent to Adam, it has the HUD in there, HUD being a heads-up display. It displays, you pull this lens down in front of you, and it projects at infinite focus all your flight data in front of you. It's your primary flight instrument, airspeed, attitude, heading. I digress. It's a $10,000 lens.
Yeah. So they provide us with special cleaning, you know, but, but it's, it's, I think it's about a 50% alcohol wet wipe and then a special dry cloth to, because you don't want it to dry out there. The alcohol would splotch if it were just allowed to dry. So, but, but that's why I was curious if the pen was alcohol, if it was done, you know, to break down, they, they do it to break down oils and things like that. You're not supposed to touch that lens, but of course people seem to think it's
a touchscreen and fingerprints all over. You're like, ah, all right. But, but there's a special anti-reflective coating on it and all that. Yeah. That's what you're trying to avoid damaging.
Yeah. You, we, when I worked in an office, so this is, you know, before my kids were even glimmers, uh, I remember learning the hard way that like Windex, uh, would remove the anti-glare coating immediately from your displays because the cleaning crew would come in at night and clean everything, including all of our displays. They would dust our displays, which of course meant their rags had like Windex
on them. And I got a new display one day. And of course the cleaning crew came in that night and did their job. And then, uh, the next day I noticed that my job on your display, my brand new display looked very different. I was like, Oh no. So then we, you know, enlightened everyone, me, the staff, and of course the cleaning crew at Citibank, to don't do this anymore. Maybe that's not such a good idea. And they were like, oh my gosh,
we're so sorry. And I was like, yeah, you didn't know. I didn't know. You know, it's like you didn't even think about it. Yeah. Oh, so Pete, here's the thing. So I had to Google this because I was curious. So the lenspen.com site says, how does this work?
The cleaning tip surface is covered like was mentioned in that tip with a special invisible carbon compound that removes the fingerprint oils this is not high tech this is old tech many years ago our grandmothers often used newspapers to clean the windows and mirrors in their house why did that work so well newspapers are cut with printer's ink which adds carbon molecules and has the unique ability to absorb oils what interesting you know i've I've always used newspaper instead
of paper towels when I clean windows. Used Windex and newspaper, but it never occurred to me that it was the printer's ink. Yeah. Yeah, my grandmother taught me that, too. She would come visit, and she'd clean our windows, and she always used newspaper. It gets the dirt and oils off, I guess, because of the carbon. There you go. That's a quick tip. Oh, that's like, I mean, like if anything deserves the magical bell, it's your respective grandmother's. Like, that's it. I love it. Wow.
That's awesome. I love it. That's something, again, that, you know, I've just always done. I've always used newspaper to clean windows. Of course. It's amazing. Amazing. You forget that you learned it. You just knew it. You just knew it. Right. Right. Well, that's the ultimate quick tip right there. Right. Yeah. Right. That's it. Yeah. Wow. All right. I'm going to share Doug's cool stuff found here because it's so cool. And I've been keeping it in our hopper for far too long.
We were talking about widgets in our Discord channel. And I think we even had the conversation here. Often where I'm out and about and it's like I'm on Wi-Fi, which network am I on? Like, is this something I want to be on or is this that slow as molasses network that I've learned to hate but I use sometimes anyway? And there is no way in Apple's widgets to do that. But thankfully, R.N. Doug in our Discord hipped us to the existence of Widgy, W-I-D-G-Y. And this is a widget app.
I looked in Widget Smith because that's kind of the default, like super powerful widget app doesn't have any of these features. Widgy does. There is a stock widget in Widgy that shows you your Wi-Fi and cellular speeds and bandwidth used in real time, which is cool, but it does not by default show you the name of the Wi-Fi network.
It was very easy for me to take 90 seconds and edit a copy of their stock Wi-Fi widget and add current Wi-Fi network SSID to it, and you get to lay it out, and it's got like a grid thing, and you just put it where you want, and then the widget exists and I added the widget and I'm good to go and it still is there on my phone now.
Widgie is freemium so you get to create one widget with it that you can use for free and then if you want to have multiple widgets, well, that's what you pay for and that makes perfect sense to me and I think it was, I don't know, eight bucks or something like that but. Yeah, it's a cool little thing so I was stoked to find Find out about all these little widget apps. Now I'm going to have to spend a Saturday afternoon and rethink my entire world of widgets. So thank you for that, RNDoug.
Oh, do we have anything else for today? Or we get, we're at, we're at a minute, a minute, an hour. Tennessee Papa. Yes. Discord chat says you can long press the wifi icon and it shows you the network you're on. That is true. Yes. And that also came up in this other discussion. You're right. You can go to the control center, long press the wifi icon, and it will show you the name it for multiple steps. Yeah. Multiple steps.
Yeah, exactly. Whoever, whoever brought this up in the discord wanted just a quick at a glance way.
Way and so it was like well let's see if that if that exists if it doesn't you're totally right like it's it is right there at your fingertips this is there if you just even want to glance at it which is which is what he was looking for so even handier yeah yeah yep so the other thing i want to mention from the earlier newspaper newsprint thing yeah if it wasn't obvious do not clean your vision pro lenses with newspaper thank you for saying that yes.
It's not the same as the lens pen The lens pen is specifically designed for Delicate lenses Newsprint, your windows in your house Are much more durable, You know And less important if there's Micro scratches in them too Yeah, fair Yeah, yeah, yeah, Alright, thanks for hanging out with us Bandwidth Gods in Hong Kong Thank you for keeping Pete's bandwidth As solid as you did for our episode here. Tip me on. Yeah. It's amazing. Outstanding. Thanks for hanging out with us, folks. Thanks to Cashfly.
Oh, yeah, go ahead, Pete. Yeah. I want you to share the show. Some of you haven't mentioned in a while, Dave. Give us a review. MacGeekGab.com slash review. Go there and give us five stars, won't you please? Thank you. Thank you for that. I think the bandwidth gods have, Pete, about a full thousand millisecond delay from the rest of us, but it's okay. That's where that little hiccup just happened there, but it's all good. We're fine. So yes, please do.
Thank you for reminding everybody of MacGeekGab.com slash review for those five-star reviews. Bandwidth, thanks to Cashfly. Thanks to all of you for your questions, your tips, your comments. It's what allows us to continue doing this show, and we are honored to be the stewards of this amazing community. And thank you for allowing us to keep doing that. Make sure you check out our sponsors. You can always look at macgeekup.com slash sponsors.
We keep that up to date with not only the sponsors of recent episodes, but also any deals that we know of from past sponsors. They might even not be current, but you can go find deals there. Music. So, MattKeyCab.com slash sponsors. Maybe I should link that from slash deals, too. Adam, before we send everyone on their way on this fine day, it's always a fine day, no matter when you're listening, do you have three words to potentially share?
Absolutely. Don't get caught. Made on a Mac, See ya Later.